Emphasized comments lost during merge (possible bug?)

Greetings everyone. I wonder if anyone has any experience with using
emphasized comments in merged indexes. We have been using swish-e 1.3.2 on
a site with approximately 8000 html files for a few months now. We have
been using the "EMPHASIZECOMMENTS" option to allow the addition of comments
to float some top-level index pages high in the search results. For example:
<!-- search keys: widget widget widget widget widget -->
The idea is that no matter how many pages we have describing specific
widgets, our main "index of widgets" page will always appear first when
someone executes a search with the word "widget" in it.
Anyhow, we have been using following settings with great success:
[swish.config file]
IndexComments 1
[config.h]
#define EMPHASIZECOMMENTS 1
However, the site has grown to the point that swish-e kept running out of
memory during indexing. So we set up a merge, and everything appeared to
be working great. However, we soon discovered that some of the "comment
emphasized" documents were no longer floating up in the list. For example,
a pre-merge search for "widget" would return a relevance of 1000 on our
above document. However, now that we are using merge, it appears with a
relevance of 54!
Could it be that when the redundant words are thrown out during the merge
that the high-scores associated with our comment emphasized document are
being tossed as well?
Any help on this issue would be greatly appreciated. We have hundreds of
pages describing specific types of widgets which now come before our main
"index of widget types" page!
Thanks,
Eric
-- Eric Weik
-- Lytha Studios Digital Media Development
-- mailto:eweik@ls-dmd.com
-- http://www.ls-dmd.com/